Hey there! My name is Jing and I started studying at CDNIS since August, 2017. I enjoy doing sports, reading, listening and playing music, and doing photography. I hope you will enjoy my blog and thanks for stopping by. The featured image is a photo taken by myself in Switzerland, the alps.

Give a brief description of an oil spill and how it can be cleaned up using science.

Oil spills happen usually because someone spilled oil from the oil tankers and the oil will go into the ocean. It is a release of liquid petroleum into the environment and it’s a form of pollution caused by humans. The ecosystem beside it will often be affected by oil spills. It can be cleaned up by using different methods. The method I researched is using oil skimmers. Oil skimmers is a machine where the machine extracts oil from the water. This method can be very efficient and can save money from wastewater treatments.

Is science good for humanity? Do the benefits of scientific discovery outweigh the problems it causes?

Yes, science is good for humanity because it helps us to improve our world and solve problems. Science can help us improve our technology and it makes our world more convenient. For example, we as humans, we need improvements on certain branches such as transportation. With science, we developed trains, cars, planes, boats, etc. With these, we can travel easier and we won’t need to take months to be at a destination. No, I don’t think the benefits of science discovery outweigh the problems because even we develop a new type of technology or discovery something, there will be an automatic problem that will appear. For example, if we developed planes, we will need to consider the problem of letting a lot of pollution in our world. Although we solved a problem, there are still questions or problems we need to solve after that. That’s why I think benefits do not outweigh problems.

What are some cultural considerations people make when designing products?

When designing products, we think about designs that might be offensive to people in the culture and try not to make it. We also investigate what are some lucky signs or symbols in this culture and try to include them in our design. Furthermore, we would think about what an object represents and should we use it in the design. For example, in my design, I used the sign of a butterfly and it meant happiness and beauty in the Chinese culture, but it might have other meanings in other cultures.

How does the design of a product communicate traditions and values?

The design of a product communicates traditions and values by using designs that have a special meaning. They can also represent what a person wishes or their values and it can be affected by the symbols, fonts, text, etc. These different aspects of a design will communicate what a person looks up to since they are the ones that want to use these designs.

Are handmade products an effective way of minimizing environmental impact? Why or why not?

In my opinion, handmade products is an effective way of minimizing environmental impact. I think that because we spend less money on buying materials. Instead, we put together green materials that might be recycled before. These materials are much better than products you bought because these materials save resources from the environment. It has less impact because it doesn’t use up a lot of things in the environment. In conclusion, making your products is much more better than buying products.

Today we did an activity on Desmos and we tried to combine algebra equations into real-life situations. We basically need to put car park dividers in a car park space but having an equal amount of space for each car to park in. In this situation, we used letters as algebra representatives and we are trying to use this formula created and make sure it works in any situation based on the car park. It’s related to the statement of inquiry because we used these formulas and it can make us calculate the spaces in a quicker and more accurate way. Although this situation is online, we can apply it in real life and apply the equation as well.

What makes a credible scientist?

Based on this unit, using the data you actually collected and interpreting and reflecting on that makes you a credible scientists. Reflecting on what we collected from our experiments can let us be a credible scientist because all of our data are collected from a real experiment. Us using real data makes us a very credible science because every part of our report is true.

Why is the scientific ‘way of knowing’ used in medicine compared to other ways of knowing?

Being credible is important and used in medicine because if you work in medicine, it’s a subject that affects how people will react to the medicine. If you do not react correctly to the data you collected, it might make people sicker or even worse, pass away because they’ve been using the wrong kind of medicine the whole time. On the contrary, if you reflect on true data, it will make the local community better and make people feel better.

How would you improve your seed dispersal investigation if you were to repeat it?

If I were to repeat it, I would change the range of the independent variable because we can’t tell the difference of the shapes while doing the experiment. I would change the range by making the range wider such as starting with 100 degrees, then 110, 120, 130, and so on. I would also change the way I communicate the method because some parts of the method isn’t that clear, it will make people that didn’t know about this experiment at all confused.

During grade 7, I participated in different activities identified as service as action. Some of the events are volunteered, and some are school designed. Some of these events are not what I want to do but I tried my best, and others are quite interesting because I want to participate in them. Here are some events I participated this year:

Sabah CAS Week Trip

In our Sabah CAS Week Trip, our team built stairs for the local community over there. The stairs are pretty tough to deal with to be honest, but I tired my best to contribute to our team and the local community. The hard part of this project is that we need to work in a hot weather, and the tasks we need to complete is not easy. So, our group worked really hard everyday and in the end, we finished building our steps and we’re happy for what we did.

Mapping – Service Day

For our Grade 7 service day, I choosed mapping for the Stanley district as my service project. On that day, our group went to Stanley and jot down the locations we think it’s important for target readers such as families, tourists, etc. After we gathered information about these sites and make a note of it. After we arrived back to school, we begin to put down the information we researched on an online mapped and produced an online map giving out information about Stanley.

Terry Fox Run

I participated in the Terry Fox Run because I’m a member of the cross country team and this is one of the running events. I ran 5km in the terry fox run and had lots of fun in it!

Media Team

I contributed to the media team and school events of using photography, my long time interest. I used my photography interest and took photos for the lower school production. It’s a school event that I’m interested in participating and I believe I have the knowledge to do so. I also contributed in other school events using photography such as USSC Tug of War, USSC Dance Night, Staff vs. Student Volleyball, Staff vs Student Basketball etc.

In this week, we worked on our prototypes for innovation week. The whole point of innovation week is to come up a product to solve a local or global problem. For our group, we have me, Bailey, and Emma on our team. We decided to solve the problem of controlling and tracking mental health issues to prevent suicide for youths around the world. So we come up with the idea of creating this bracelet and connecting the bracelet to a app we made to collect data. The bracelet comes with two button, one represents if you press it down, it will track how much time you spend on an emotion. For example, if you’re feeling sad, you can press the button and it will collect the data and send it to the app. For the second button, it’s for contacting your parents, friends, and counsellor in case some emergency comes up such as panic attacks or suddenly in uncontrollable situations. For the app, it has five screens and one is for emotion tracker, one is to connect with qualified therapists in Hong Kong, one is for heart rate check, one is for advices for keeping calm in emergency situations, and the final one is for saving contacts. We also named our product Mindset.

Here’s picture of the bracelet which is 3D printed:

Layout of app:

We also made multiple advertisements for our product such as:

We also made graphs for business plans and financial marketing plans:

On the last Friday, we presented our product to different people such as classmates, friends, and parents.

On the celebration, our group got the award of Best Explained groups and we are proud of what we did all this week.